Ferdinand Paleologus (Italian: Ferdinando Paleologo; June 1619 – 2 October 1670) was a 17th-century English-Greek freeholder, sugar or cotton planter and churchwarden and possibly one of the last living members of the Palaiologos dynasty, which had ruled the Byzantine Empire from 1259 to its fall in 1453.

Ferdinand was the fourth and youngest son of Theodore Paleologus, a Greek soldier and assassin who moved to England in the late 16th century.

He cultivated cotton or sugar and possibly pineapples and was influential in the affairs of the local St. John's Parish Church, for which he became a vestryman and then a churchwarden.

Clifton Hall, though radically changed since Ferdinand's time, remains to this day one of the largest, grandest and oldest great houses in Barbados.

The current marker for his gravesite at St. John's Parish Church, which erroneously gives the date of his death as 1678 instead of 1670, was erected in 1906 and is a local tourist spot.

[3] The lineage of Ferdinand and Theodore can be verified as true with the exception of an ancestor called John, purported to be the son of Thomas Palaiologos but absent in contemporary sources, making their descent from the emperors plausible, but somewhat uncertain.

[6] After his baptism in 1619, the next record of Ferdinand is his name appearing on the list of soldiers present at St Michael's Fort in Plymouth Sound in 1639.

[16] Clifton Hall has changed radically since Ferdinand's time, most of the rooms and exterior dating to renovation and construction projects in the early 19th century.

[19] According to Henry Bradfield, a 19th century historian of Barbados: [The body was discovered] in a large leaden coffin, with the feet pointing to the east, the usual mode of burial among the ancient Greeks.

On opening the coffin, which was partially destroyed from the action of the air on the metal, it was found to contain the perfect skeleton, which impressed all present with the idea that he must have been a man of extraordinary stature, and this, as a local ontogenarian observed, was known traditionally to have been the Greek prince from Cornwall.

[19]The lead coffin was opened a second time, on 3 May 1844, to "test the truth of the tradition", wherein Ferdinand's skeleton was again found to have been of exceptional size and imbedded in quicklime,[19] sometimes used in burials to speed up the disintegration of corpses if there was fear that a disease might spread.

The body being buried with the feet pointing to the east is, despite local legend and the writings of historians on Barbados, not a strange Greek custom but the common practice for burials in England.

The letter supposedly requested that if that was the case, the head of the family should be provided with the means of returning to Greece, with the trip paid for by the Greek government.

[27] Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands (1950) briefly mentions the fate of Ferdinand and his family,[24] stating the following: Such then, was the destiny that scattered the bones of those exiled princes in Tuscany, Cornwall, London, Barbados, Wapping, and Corunna; a strange and rather inappropriate story.

[28] One evening around 1790, the French merchant and adventurer Victor Hugues enters their mansion and tells the main characters of the various wonders and sights he has come across on his travels, notably "on Barbados, the tomb of a nephew of Constantine XI, the last emperor of Byzantium, whose ghost appears on stormy nights to solitary wanderers...".